What kinds of searches can you do?

Many libraries have gone to the single search box (popularised by Google). Technically, this is called a keyword search, and it usually searches all the text in the record.

Pro: You don’t need to guess which field a given thing might be in, and searching on things that aren’t subject headings but show up in the title or blurb will still come up.

Con: You can get a lot of false results that don’t actually have what you want, especially if you’re searching for commonly used words.

If you end up with all sorts of results that don’t help you, two things can help. First, there’s probably an option somewhere on that first search screen that says something like ‘advanced search’. Second, once you do a search, you may be presented with some options to help you filter the results.

Advanced search

Depending on the catalog, you will usually see a variety of options that let you limit your search in different ways. Common ones include:

You may need to do a little digging in the help information (likely also linked from the search form) to understand your options in detail.

Limiting results

It’s sometimes (okay, often) a lot easier to start with a keyword search and then limit your results in different ways.

In my library’s catalog, I can limit by the following, to give you an example:

Location (so I can find books in my local library)

Availability (books I can get right now, either in a library or online)

Whether the search term is found in the title or subject

Format (book, ebook, audiobook, etc.)

What collections it is in (this distinguishes library and children or adult)

Places the book takes place

And then it shows me related searches, including established subject terms, and some additional suggestions.

Understanding subject headings

In practical terms, you are probably not going to do what librarians do to learn about subject headings.

(For the curious, this involves most library schools require a class in cataloging that includes a lot of the specifics. Then you go out into the world and spend a lot of time starting at instructions and hoping you’re doing it right, punctuated by asking other people if you are.)

Individual libraries also have their own policies – the library I work at has set up a list of keywords instead of official subject headings, because a lot of our needs aren’t represented in them (or are using terms that aren’t a great fit for us – they’re dated, they draw from specialities that aren’t the terms the people who use us will use, or both!)

As a library catalog user, my best tip is for you to look for hints about what kinds of terms will work. Fortunately, these are pretty straightforward

1) Try searches

One of the best tips for getting your bearings in a new catalogue (by which I mean one that’s new to you) is to try some searches of items you’re pretty sure are in there, and that are reasonably similar for other items you want to look for.

Ideally, these will be the same subject (generally speaking) as the items you want, but if you’re not sure about that, at least try for the same topic area – if you want to do searches about religious information, try other religious titles or topics. If you’re looking for history, try other historical things. And so on.

The goal here is to do a few searches and see what comes up and how the search terms work.

2) Linked subjects

In many library catalogs, you have the option to click on the subject headings to find other items with that subject heading. This can be tremendously helpful once you find one book that’s what you want. (Of course, it’s finding that first thing that can be tricky!)

You may want to add several books to a wish list or cart (whatever the catalog uses) or bookmark them before you go too far astray in your searches, so you can get back to your starting point again easily.

If you’re having trouble with searches, try simpler ones – for example, if you’re trying to search an entire title, try

3) Look for known books or topics that should be in the collection.

For example, for modern Pagan materials, I often suggest people try Scott Cunningham’s Wicca for the Solitary Practitioner, or Starhawk’s Spiral Dance. Both are commonly held by most moderate to large library systems, and they’ll give you a starting place for what terms are being used.

In my local library system, Cunningham’s book comes up with the subject headings “witchcraft”, “magic”, and “ritual”.

That’s a hint that I probably want to check ‘witchcraft’ as well as ‘Wicca’ as subject headings.

(This is because older books were cataloged before Wicca became an official Library of Congress subject heading around 2006 or 2007 – libraries don’t generally go back and recatalog subject headings unless there’s a very significant reason to, because it’s a big cost of staff time.

Something like ‘witchcraft’ and ‘Wicca’ where it can be tricky to figure out exactly which heading applies to some books, and where ‘witchcraft’ is still accurate, if a bit more general ideal, is less likely to get edited than, say, a library that is fixing or updating subject headings to reflect current understanding of gender identity or sexual orientation or legal issues.)

4) Check the ‘about’ for information or ask a librarian.

Still stuck? Check the library’s help information or ask a librarian for help – you can ask general questions, and they can help you navigate.

If you don’t want to (or can’t get to) the physical library easily, most libraries have an option for email or chat help these days, at least some of the time.

Today’s discussion of catalogues is about how you find things by topic. I talked about some of this in my post from March about personal libraries, but I want to talk more here about how libraries select subject terms.

It’s mysterious

Let’s be honest. A lot of the process librarians use to select subject terms is pretty mysterious. That’s because we’re trying to label quite complex things in a very complex world, and we’re using a variety of tools to do it, because outside of very very small collections (relatively speaking – in practice, this is probably a couple of thousand books at the smallest), it’s too big for anyone to keep in their head.

On the good side, this means people have to write things down, which makes long-term consistency easier, and which can help us see patterns.

On the bad side, it means things can feel (and be) very rigid, or slow to change, or complicated to navigate. All of which can make things a lot less accessible or useful. And the speed of change often means terms don’t reflect current understanding of things like identity, culture, or communities.

So where do these terms come from?

In libraries, libraries usually pick a set of subject headings to use. The subject headings act as a controlled vocabulary (which basically means ‘we have a fixed set of terms we choose from.) Like I explained in the post last March, this is what helps us avoid using all of these terms for the same thing:

felines

cats

cat

domesticated cat

Sometimes we might want to make distinctions (domestic cats as compared to lions or tigers or snow leopards), but if we don’t, we want to pick one term and settle on it.

Libraries use one of a couple of common lists for subject headings. The most common, probably, are the Library of Congress. These are very extensive (it takes up about 20 volumes as print books on a shelf) but the fact the Library of Congress deals with so many different topics means that it’s often quite slow to make adjustments.

For example, the addition of the word “Wicca” as a subject heading only took place in about 2004, and only after a petition from a librarian. (This is often the way changes get made: one or more librarians notice that a term needs adding or improving or changing, and they provide evidence.) The term ‘Wicca’ had been in broad general use since the 1950s and 60s, so that’s about 50 years.

One other important note is that many libraries don’t have the resources to go back and catalogue older items to the new subject headings – so you may see pointers from new terms to check older terms as well. (This depends a lot on the library and the priority of the topic.)

Who assigns the terms?

Good question. In many cases, the subject headings are primarily assigned by whoever it is at the Library of Congress assigns the headings for that particular item. These are likely people who have some experience in the general field or area of the books, but you can usually assume they’re not experts or specialists in all the nuances of the field or topic.

(In other words, they’re not going to get really nuanced about choosing, say, a term of magic or ritual in a Pagan setting. They may assign them both.)

Usually terms are based on the few most obvious and relevant topic. If something is mentioned for less than a chapter or two, it almost certainly won’t get a subject heading unless it’s something really unusual. For a full length nonfiction book, you can usually expect 3-5 subject headings.

You can also assume the person doing the cataloguing probably hasn’t read the book. Cataloguers don’t have time for that! They’re relying on the blurb on the back and things like skimming the table of contents. Publishers can also suggest subject headings or terms to include.

Some libraries do have their own cataloguers evaluate materials and add or edit terms. This is particularly true for things like local history or other items of particular local interest.

Or a school library might assign a heading for particular regular class assignments or projects, to make it easier to find those items. (There are other ways to group things, too.) Some libraries do a “Best resource” subject heading to make it easy to find the best resources in a topic. (Mine does this.)

Welcome to part 2 of my series on catalogues. In this part, I’m going to talk a bit about different kinds of searches you might want to be able to do.

Keyword

This is the kind of search many of us are most familiar with today is a keyword search. You know, the kind where you. get presented with a search box, and you type words in, and sometimes the thing you want comes out the other end?

Keyword searches basically search anywhere in the searchable text for a word or phrase (depending on how things are set up). This can be really helpful, or really horrible.

Helpful

Keyword searches can be great because you don’t have to remember what kind of information the thing you’re searching for is. And you don’t have to figure out how it might be organised in the thing you’re searching. The word matches or it doesn’t.

They’re also fantastic for something we’re doing at work – instead of having hundreds of subject headings that get used for just one thing (a person, a device or software program, a tool), we’re making sure those are in the abstract, and then assigning more general subject headings.

That way, people can both look at groups of things (handy in a rapidly changing setting like technology) and also find specific tools or people if they need to.

Horrible

The downside to keyword searching is that if the word is only in one place in the record, and there’s a typo or something else that affects how the word is entered, you won’t ever find that record.

For example, in some systems, “cat” and “cats” may be treated as different words, and typos or alternate spellings definitely will be. There’s a word that is all over our work catalog, but it is sometimes spelled with a hyphen and sometimes no hyphen (the two parts of the word together) and our catalogue searches these as different things.

Depending on the system, the catalogue may adapt some things for you, but it probably won’t be as wide-ranging as your favourite search engines.

Somewhere in between

One of the challenges of keyword searching is that you need to have terms that are unique enough to make a search find what you want – and sometimes that’s going to be really challenging.

I was part of a long-term Harry Potter project – it ran for 7 years, and over those years, we averaged 100 emails many days. As you can imagine, a lot of them had very similar terms and names in them, so we had to learn to figure out other ways to search email to find specific details (and since it was such a long project, sometimes those details were a year or two back, and relied on someone’s memory of what term we were using.)

This eventually drove me to create a wiki for the project that ended up with 9000+ pages, but that’s a whole other story…. (And set of posts.)

This is where learning to think about your keyword searches in more complex ways (such as using multiple terms, using boolean searches, or using ways to filter or limit the results) can be a big help.

Boolean?

You may remember hearing about this in library classes back in your education somewhere. Boolean is the term for doing searches that are joined by AND, OR, or NOT.

(You don’t usually actually have to capitalise the terms, and some systems may use symbols instead of words, but people often do when explaining them because it makes it a lot easier to figure out what’s going on. On some systems, you can select them from drop-down menus.)

AND means you want results that match all the items you list with AND. For example, “cats AND dogs” will return only those items that talk about both cats and dogs.

OR means you want anything that mentions either of them (or any of them, if you have more than two terms.) In this case, “cats OR dogs” would return any page that has “cats” on it, any page that has “dogs”, and also any pages that have both terms.

NOT means that it won’t return pages that have the term indicated by the NOT. So, “cats NOT dogs” would give you all the pages about cats, but not any that mention dogs. This one can be tricky because it would also leave out things like “Cats are not like dogs at all!” or “This is the page for people who love cats, no dogs here.”

In many search tools for catalogues, you can do different combinations – for example, you could say you wanted to search all items mentioning cats or dogs (keyword search), and then say you didn’t want a particular format (NOT book, in the format search).

Other tips

In some search tools, you can also do more complex searches. Usually, you can find out about the options by looking for the search help information, or sometimes an advanced search tool.

Some common options include:

1) Searching on a phrase.

Usually, this is done by putting quotes around the phrase. “Sun and moon”, for example. Normally this will search for the exact words in that order.

2) Limiting results in different ways.

These can include by date (usually you can specify a range, with some common ones being pre-set, like ‘last month’ or ‘last year’.) It can include things like ‘this email has an attachment’. It can include multiple search fields.

A lot of this depends on context and your particular technology.

3) Type of resource

In some tools, you can search by different types of resource ( for example, on Google, you can search on word or phrase, and then also look for images, news stories, videos, etc. each of which have some additional tools

Next up, talking about controlled vocabulary and why it is both handy and complicated.

4) Not finding expected results?

Sometimes you’ll do a search, and you’ll get very different results than you expected – you know there are things about that in the thing you’re searching. If that’s the case, try a simpler search (just the title or just a phrase from the subtitle, for example). Sometimes a symbol will do something you didn’t expect (in our catalogue at work, a colon will tell the computer to do a ‘from X to Y’ search, so you get really weird results when you put a colon between a title and subtitle if you don’t put the whole thing in quotation marks.)

Usually the help information or the library staff can help you sort this out.